The Magic Kingdom

REEL #1

This is Harley Mann talking. I don’t know why I said that. The words just fell out of my mouth. I guess I’m not accustomed to this mode of communication. I’m recording myself on a brand-­spanking-­new Grundig TK46 machine that I purchased yesterday after I drove up to Orlando from my home here in St. Cloud for the official opening of Walt Disney’s gigantic amusement park, which is what inspired me to finally tell everything I can remember of certain events that I experienced and witnessed in my childhood and youth in this region south of Orlando and west of Lake Okeechobee, this sprawling district of lakes and swamps and creeks and sawgrass savanna and pine and live oak woods and palmetto that once upon a time was the headwaters of the Everglades.

That’s my statement of intention. I’ll probably tell about a lot of other things, too. In any case, instead of writing it down, I’ve decided to talk the whole damn thing into a tape recorder, because I’m a talker, not a writer. Everyone says that about me, sometimes with admiration, sometimes not so much, although they agree that my letters and postcards and personal notes and even my business correspondence are very expressive and descriptive. Just not as interesting as my talk. Which is probably because when I speak I almost never know what I’ll say next, but when I write, since it almost always concerns business, I do.

There will be a batch of tapes when I’m done. Maybe whoever inherits my house and the rest of my personal property will someday transcribe them. I’ve got a last will and testament sworn and written, so I know who’ll end up with my money. But I have no idea who will end up with the tapes. I hope that whoever does, he or she will make a faithful transcription and donate it to the St. Cloud Veterans Memorial Public Library or one of the local historical societies, so that after I have departed this world for the other, the true story of the Shaker settlement called New Bethany and the people who lived there nearly a century ago will be known. It’s a scandalous story almost completely forgotten now, and when remembered at all is lathered in lies and error.

Also, having recently turned eighty-­one years of age, although still of more or less sound mind and body, my departure time is fast approaching. It’s why yesterday, after attending the official opening ceremonies of Disney’s amusement park, I got back into my Packard and drove down to the Montgomery Ward store in St. Cloud and marched in and purchased the recording machine and two dozen reels of blank tape. It’s why this morning, after I made and ate breakfast, I set it up on my front porch, and as if talking to a trusted friend who knows nothing of these events and remarkable personalities, I have begun talking into it. It’s early and the sun is still too low to bake away the morning dew, and nobody has walked by the house yet, but soon enough they will, and when they do they will likely think old Harley Mann is talking to himself in a steady stream and must have finally lost his marbles from all those years of living alone.

I suspect I’ll be out here on the porch for many days before my story gets told, as it’s a long and tangled tale, and the world today is so different from the world of my youth that I’ll have to swerve away from its main thrust often and at length to describe it properly, so that whoever eventually listens to it or reads a transcription—­assuming one gets made—­will understand why certain people back then, myself especially, behaved as we did, both badly and, on a few occasions, well.

Human nature doesn’t change, but contexts and circumstances do, so let me set the context and describe the circumstances. It’s been close to seventy years since my family settled among the radical Ruskinites at their utopian colony called Waycross, and we found ourselves living in communitarian squalor alongside White swampers and Blacks in the marshes and piney forests of southeast Georgia. This was where my family began its long pilgrimage from light to darkness to light again, as it seemed to my childish eyes, and then in later years to still deeper darkness that I thought would never end. And then it did end, leaving me alone here in St. Cloud for most of a lifetime, ending up on the front porch of this old clapboard shotgun house talking to an electric–powered plastic box about a world that existed before the common use of electricity or the commercial use of plastic.

I could begin there, with our arrival at the Georgia commune in 1901. Or even earlier, with our family’s life in the original Ruskinite colony of Graylag up north, outside Indianapolis, where I was born. But it’s not my story that I need to tell, it’s the New Bethany Shakers’, so I’ll begin instead in 1902, around the time when we first met the Shakers, when my twin brother, Pence, and I were twelve-­year-­old boys and we Manns were living like slaves on Rosewell Plantation, sixty miles south of Waycross, over by Valdosta. Maybe later on, if I see the need, I’ll return to Waycross, and tell how my parents got all the way to the Okefenokee Swamp from their native Indianapolis and the Graylag colony and so on, how they went from being American followers of John Ruskin’s anticapitalist teachings to founding communitarians to schismatic Ruskinites—­an interesting account in its own right, but a whole other story for a whole other occasion. For now, I’ll just talk about how we got over from Waycross to the Rosewell Plantation, which is where we eventually connected with the Shakers.

We were four children, me and my twin brother, Pence, and our brothers, Royal and Raymond, who were two years younger than me and Pence. They were also twins, a coincidence that in the eyes of the women in both the Graylag and Waycross colonies made Mother the object of an ambivalent mix of envy and pity. With two sets of twins, she could be said to have got her childbearing done in half the time of most women, but the work of raising a single baby from infancy to childhood had been doubled twice. This was before our sister, Rachel, was born. When we buried Father and set out from Waycross for Rosewell, we boys had only just learned that Mother was newly pregnant and that Rachel, the last of Mother’s children, would be born fatherless at Rosewell.

It may go without saying that we and all our fellow communards were Northern White people. Nonetheless, we had associated plenty with Blacks before we got to Rosewell Plantation. Out of habit I call them Blacks. I suppose it would be preferable to call them African-­Americans, along the line of Italo-­Americans, but that’s probably got too many syllables to catch on.

Mostly, the Blacks we knew at the Waycross colony were workers and drifters and peddlers and small farmers, some of them ex-­slaves, whose paths often brought them into proximity with us White Northern communards. But until Father died and the rest of the family decamped for what Mother believed would be a refuge at Rosewell Plantation, we had never actually lived among Blacks, or for that matter among Southern Whites, either. We children simply thought of ourselves as Yankees and spoke our English with our parents’ Northern, Indiana accents. I still do, I’m told. It’s hard to erase an accent acquired in childhood, and from birth we had lived solely among White Northerners and even a few from Canada, England, and Scotland, people who were well educated and socialist to the bone and more or less high-­minded, like the Shakers we later came to live with.

At Waycross we resided in one of the colony’s small, windowless cabins, cold and drafty and dirt–floored, with little enough room for the six of us. Father was already sick. I did not know it at first and attributed his lethargy and seeming lack of interest in the governance and administration of the colony to his disappointment in the decrepit state of affairs there. The Ruskinite colony at Waycross had lost its way long before we Manns and over fifty other men, women, and children from the original Graylag colony came down by train from Indianapolis. We were a remnant of a remnant, a lost tribe wandering in the wilderness of the southeastern United States, guided by a misinformed belief that we had been led there by men who were wise and informed, men like Father, brought to a place sanctified by a people who adhered more closely to the revealed truths of communistic living than those lapsed Ruskinites we had left behind at Graylag.

My brother Pence and I were old enough and had overheard enough of the adults’ discussions to understand roughly the cause and purpose of our departure from the only home we had known so far, the place where we had been born and had gone to school and learned to read and write and compute at a level higher than the children in the Indiana villages and farms that surrounded our commune at Graylag—­higher, indeed, than most of the local children’s parents. Until the financial and ideological quarrels that fatally divided the community into two warring parties, our life at Graylag had been a pleasing mixture of freedom and order, play and work, reflective solitude and organized group activity. Holding no worries over how to fund this communal life and no need to advance or defend any social theory, we children were given all the benefits of socialism with none of the deficits.

I was never again as happy with life as in those early years at Graylag. Until Father and Mother became ideological schismatics and split off from Graylag and set out for Waycross, my life was pastoral bliss. I was old enough to have acquired a bit of conscious personal history, eleven years of it, or at least the nine years or so from when I emerged from the cloud of infancy and began to form my first memories. Year in, year out, my life at Graylag had been a gradual, steady, happy opening-­up to the world that surrounded me, a process encouraged and protected and led by Mother and Father and the other adult members of the community. And what a paradise it was!

I wonder now if the dream of utopia, whether secular or religious, is only the dream of an adult who has never ceased resenting and grieving over his imperfect childhood and as a result spends his life trying to start it over and make it perfect this time. But what of someone like me, who actually had a perfect childhood? Someone for whom the transgressions and imperfections of life arrived later, but not so much later that his memories of idyllic perfection got displaced. Someone who could look to the past for perfection rather than to the future.

When we settled into our Waycross shanty—­for that is all it was, a shanty—­Mother hung a blanket down the middle of the cabin, and she and Father slept on a narrow bed on one side of the blanket and we four boys shared a pair of folding cots on the other. She soon appeared to be pregnant, and one memorable morning she felt compelled to announce it to us boys, though not with much joy.

“You’ll soon have another brother or a sister,” she told us. “I’ll be taking breakfast here,” she added, and instructed us to join the others at the communal dining hall. Father had been ill for weeks and had not eaten with the other colonists for several days by then.

“How soon?” I asked.

“By end of winter. Now run down to the pump and wash.” She laid out the day’s chores for us and retreated behind the cloth wall where Father still lay abed. We could hear his rapid phlegmy breathing and restless turning in the bed, as if he could not make himself comfortable no matter how he lay. The younger twins, Raymond and Royal, were to spend the day scouring the abandoned, half-­sunken railbed for bits and chunks of coal to burn in the tin stove that heated our cabin and boiled our water and cooked the little food Father could manage to keep down. Pence and I were charged with walking after breakfast back along the railbed to the main railhead in the crossroads village of Waycross to buy salt and sugar at the trading post, which Mother said Father needed to help him purge his sickness. We were pleased by the chance to get away from the sad decrepitude of the colony and briefly see how the rest of the world was getting by, but tried not to show it.

Mother no longer believed Father was suffering from malaria, she said. It was typhus.

“I didn’t know he was sick from anything,” I called to her. Pence said nothing. I was the talkative twin and usually spoke for the two of us. “I thought he was just . . .”

“What? Just what?” she asked sharply from behind the curtain.

“I dunno. Tired. From malaria. Sumpin’.”

Mother came back to us, her hands on her hips. “Speak clearly, Harley. Say you ‘do not know.’ Say ‘some-­thing.’ You’re starting to sound like the swampers and the Negroes.”

“I do-­not-­know,” I said and pointed out that it happened to be a knowledgeable woman from a Black family named Calliphant, an old woman known as Partitia, who had made the tea from the sweet Annie plant that Mother had been using to treat Father’s malaria. Partitia claimed it was a medicine she had learned from the Indians, and many of the settlers said that it had cured their malaria.

“Knowing that is how I know he does not have malaria,” she said. “Because he’s no better for it. I don’t want to talk with you any further, Harley. You’re too smart for your britches. Go, go,” she said, and she shooed us boys from the cabin, waving her hands as if at mosquitoes. She was red–faced and looked like she would cry.

It turned out that she was right and Partitia was wrong. Father did not have malaria, and soon it became evident that the rash and red spots on his body were signs of typhus, what they used to call ague and the local people called swamp fever. More than we knew, the colonists at Waycross had been enduring an epidemic of typhus. It was one of the reasons their population had diminished to such a degree and why those who had not died of it or fled back north because of it were so enervated and lethargic, why so many of the children roamed free and half-­clothed as if returning to savagery, why the fields were not planted and old crops lay rotting on the ground.

I tell this from memories of events and conversations that took place nearly seventy years ago, and an old man’s memory of his childhood is generally not to be trusted, especially when he has told his story many times over the years and has had numerous opportunities to embellish and elaborate it and excise from it anything unpleasant or that reflects unfavorably on him, until his story ends up displacing his memory. But these happen to be stories I’ve never told before, in most cases not even to myself. As a result, my memories are relatively untainted by repetition and revision.

And I remember that particular day at Waycross clearly, because it began when Mother told us boys that she was pregnant with her fifth child, who would turn out five months later to be our sister, Rachel. And it was the morning we learned that Father was sick with typhus, not malaria, and realized that he was probably going to die of it. It was the morning when I first saw how terrified Mother was of losing Father and of having to take care of her four, soon to be five, children alone in the wilderness.

It was the same morning, as I learned later that day after Pence and I returned from Waycross village, that the man who managed Rosewell Plantation for Mr. Hamilton Couper had ridden sixty miles north to Waycross to recruit disillusioned and desperate members of the Ruskinite colony to go back with him to the plantation to live and work there as skilled laborers and household staff. And when Pence and I returned with the salt and sugar we’d been sent for, we found Father and Mother in deep discussion of Mr. Hamilton Couper’s manager’s offer.

Father lay in their rope bed, feverish and gaunt, his face and arms covered in a rash with raised red blotches blooming like phlox. He spoke haltingly, with great effort, but firmly nonetheless, as if his mind were focused on one thing and one thing only, which was to have Mother and his four sons and the expected fifth child transferred to Rosewell. He did not say it outright, but it was clear to me that Father would not be going with us.

Not ever. At that moment I believed that I could read the future. I was the eldest, born ten minutes before Pence, and I knew that my childhood was ending and Pence’s would soon follow. Mother sat beside Father on a stool and with a spoon administered salt and sugar diluted in warm water. She spoke to him in a low voice, as if not wishing to intensify their disagreement, but not willing to let it go, either.

“I would feel better if we stayed put,” she said, “until you are well again. And then we’ll all go together.”

“No. You and the boys go now. While you are still healthy. I will follow.”

“There’s no one here who’ll care for you if we leave.”

Father named five or six people who had come from Indiana and joined the Georgia colony with us.

“They can barely take care of themselves,” she said.

“Go now. Or others will get there before you. They’ll fill up the positions and take the housing.”

Mother was known as an accomplished seamstress, one of the skills supposedly needed at Rosewell for making and repairing the field and mill workers’ clothing. Father’s experience as a smith was also much sought after. Pence and I were regarded as old enough for small household tasks and some of the field work, and soon our younger brothers would be available to work alongside us. We were told that the plantation was an enormous agricultural and industrial enterprise, practically a town on its own, with many hundreds of employees and their families residing there. I wanted to go there. How could it be worse than Waycross? But I wanted Father to go with us.

Father at that moment turned his body and practically flung his gaze at me. “Harley, you will be the man of the family,” he declared, as if it were a discovery, a sudden revelation, not a charge or command.

Mother said, “No. He’ll be a child for a long time yet.”

Father then closed his eyes and seemed to be smiling at something only he knew and understood, something too profound and true to be shared with us, something unwanted by his family, but something he nonetheless desired both for himself and for us. And wanted especially for me, his oldest son. Then, during the night, while my brothers and I slept and Mother kept watch at his side, Father died.

And so dutifully, even though Father was no longer able to enforce it, we followed his final bidding, and within hours of the lightly attended service at the colony’s nondenominational chapel, where three or four of my parents’ compatriots spoke admiringly of ­Father’s character and his blacksmithing skills, they buried his body in the colony’s marshy, overgrown graveyard. We packed our personal belongings and left on foot for the railhead in the village of Waycross.

It was close to a half day’s walk under a winter sun and a blank blue sky. Like refugees, we carried our clothing and blankets and a few cooking utensils and a day’s worth of food in twine sacks and a canvas tote. Having sold Father’s blacksmithing tools and the last of the family furniture and household goods to the remaining settlers for pennies on the dollar of their true value, Mother carried a small amount of cash that, after paying for our train fare from the Waycross station to Valdosta, she hoped would suffice until the first monthly payday at the plantation. She had been promised a dollar plus housing and food for a six-­day week’s work as a seamstress. In addition, Pence and I were to receive twenty-­five cents per week for our sunrise-­to-­sunset labor in the fields or at one of the mills and factories and shops that clustered about the main plantation house, where the Couper family was said to reside in old-­fashioned pre–­Civil War splendor.

We had not seen Rosewell in person, but had heard about its scale of operation and high level of prosperity from our colonist neighbors, some of whom envied our move and promised soon to follow. The swampers residing in and around the village of Waycross and the Blacks living nearby, like the Calliphant family and their mother, the medicine woman named Partitia, spoke less admiringly of Rosewell. Which we Manns attributed to envy of the rich by the poor and ignorant and, in the case of the Blacks, to superstition.

I say “we Manns” when I mean Father and Mother and their fellow adult colonists at Waycross, because when you’re a child you passively accept your parents’ and their friends’ view of reality, no matter how distorted by ideology or religion, and I was still a child, even though Father had made me the man of the family. But I remember Partitia Calliphant, when she was treating Father mistakenly for malaria with the sweet Annie plant, interrupting Father’s praise of Rosewell and telling him, “That place a slavery plantation, Mr. Mann. Even White folks shouldn’t go there for any business at all. Might never come back.”

This exchange occurred some days before Mr. Couper’s manager came to recruit the malcontents. It was back when Father had first spoken of going on his own to the plantation to see if his services as a smith could be hired out on a part-­time basis. It was one of the few ways he was able to generate cash money in that communistic society, where all the necessities were supposedly provided by the community or purchased with Ruskinite scrip. Members with outside sources of cash were free to embellish their necessities with luxuries, but only as long as those outside sources did not require an exchange of labor. An inheritance or a packet of cash sent by a relative back in the capitalist world was permissible, but Father’s hiring out his services to a local farmer who needed his horses shod was forbidden. According to the writings of John Ruskin, it made him a labor slave. My parents and their associates were close readers of Ruskin’s Unto This Last.

Mother explained to Partitia Calliphant that this is the twentieth century and slavery has been illegal since the Emancipation Proclamation.

Partitia said nothing in response. She was a very short, round woman with smooth dark-­brown skin and heavy-­lidded pale-­blue eyes that she kept half-­closed, as if holding back a secret. She was of indeterminate age, somewhere between fifty and sixty. She knew, of course, that slavery had been made illegal and that she had been a free woman for nearly forty years, even in the south Georgia wilderness. But my parents were educated White Northerners with an affection for abstract thought. There was much in the real world that escaped their notice, much that they no doubt would have noticed if, like me, they had lived their whole lives in the Deep South. They would have known, as Mother and her four sons would soon discover at Rosewell, that at the end of the nineteenth century and even well into the twentieth, in many parts of the South the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had not been implemented.

I probably shouldn’t say it here, but I have seen and heard things in my time, seen and heard them right here in my town of St. Cloud, Florida, that make me wonder sometimes if slavery has ended yet. Or if White people have managed merely to call it by another name. When defending their allegiance to their Ruskinite socialistic credo, my parents constantly railed against what they called “slave-­wage capitalism.” If they were alive today, what would they call Mr. Walt Disney’s vast enterprise up there southwest of Orlando, where a Black man or woman seeking legitimate employment at the theme park need not bother showing his or her dark-­complected face? Everything changes, yet everything remains the same, as the French say. Slavery is as slavery does, I say. The Whites get to exchange their labor for payment, even if only for a tiny fraction of its worth, and the Blacks are chained and put to work for nothing in the prisons and on roadside gangs that people speed past every day in their air-­conditioned cars.

All right, maybe I exaggerate. An old man’s privilege, I hope. A consequence, too, of that early exposure to my parents’ need to see the world through the cracked lens of political ideology. It’s like religion. The lens clarifies, but the cracks distort the image.

I don’t normally look at the world through my long-­deceased parents’ eyes, however. I don’t ask myself what would Mother or Father think of Walt Disney’s amusement park, for instance. Or of today’s plutocrats living off the labor of others just as readily and profitably as the plutocrats of my parents’ time or John Ruskin’s. I almost never ask myself what my communist parents would think of me, their eldest and sole surviving child, who by the time I turned forty had made a small fortune buying and selling real estate and then lost most of it in old age, thanks to my greed and pride and the superior intelligence and education of men hired by Mr. Disney to buy my property at a cut rate under false pretenses, property that I probably never should have owned in the first place. What would Father and Mother say if they knew my story? What would the Shakers’ fount of wisdom and piety, Mother Ann Lee, say? Or the late Elder John Bennett and Eldress Mary Glynn, those clearheaded, high-­minded, dedicated communistic Shakers? What would they say to me now? If they could speak each to each, what would they say about me?

Theirs are the antique inner voices I’ve been hearing since I began telling my story, the story of my childhood and youth among the Shakers at New Bethany in Narcoossee, Florida, including everything that led up to the dramatic events that unfolded there in 1910 and 1911, after I became a man, and the sorrowful consequences that followed from those events. When I speak into my tape recorder, the voices of those long-­dead men and women fill my head. They’ve even begun to infiltrate and shape my own voice, the words and sentences I’m using to tell my story. It’s as if I never learned to speak like the man I have in fact become, one of those White, lifelong, small-­time Florida businessmen with no noticeable religious or political enthusiasms and no discernible class affiliation. I’m the kind of Republican or Democrat who registers as an Independent, the lapsed Protestant or Catholic who checks Christian, the Anglo-­American who thinks of himself simply as American, the male human being who thinks of himself merely as human, the White man who believes he has no color.

That’s the person I have been for most of my adult life and who I have over the years come to sound like. But when I flip the switch on my Grundig TK46 recorder and rewind and play back today’s account, as I have just finished doing, I don’t hear that person’s neutral, all-­purpose, modern American voice. Instead I hear a voice that’s never been recorded before, not even by Thomas Edison, a voice spoken in another century, the nineteenth, and another country, the south-­central Florida wilderness, a voice from long ago and far away. A voice I can barely recognize. My voice.